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I watched my husband sign the papers that would end our marriage while he was busy texting the woman he actually loved. He didn't even glance at the header. He just scribbled the sharp, jagged signature that had signed death warrants for half of New York, tossed the file onto the passenger seat, and tapped his screen again. "Done," he said, his voice devoid of emotion. That was Dante Moretti. The Underboss. A man who could smell a lie from a mile away but couldn't see that his wife had just handed him an annulment decree disguised beneath a stack of mundane logistics reports. For three years, I scrubbed his blood out of his shirts. I saved his family's alliance when his ex, Sofia, ran off with a civilian. In return, he treated me like furniture. He left me in the rain to save Sofia from a broken nail. He left me alone on my birthday to drink champagne on a yacht with her. He even handed me a glass of whiskey—her favorite drink—forgetting that I despised the taste. I was merely a placeholder. A ghost in my own home. So, I stopped waiting. I burned our wedding portrait in the fireplace, left my platinum ring in the ashes, and boarded a one-way flight to San Francisco. I thought I was finally free. I thought I had escaped the cage. But I underestimated Dante. When he finally opened that file weeks later and realized he had signed away his wife without looking, the Reaper didn't accept defeat. He burned down the world to find me, obsessed with reclaiming the woman he had already thrown away.

I stood outside my husband's study, the perfect mafia wife, only to hear him mocking me as an "ice sculpture" while he entertained his mistress, Aria. But the betrayal went deeper than infidelity. A week later, my saddle snapped mid-jump, leaving me with a shattered leg. Lying in the hospital bed, I overheard the conversation that killed the last of my love. My husband, Alessandro, knew Aria had sabotaged my gear. He knew she could have killed me. Yet, he told his men to let it go. He called my near-death experience a "lesson" because I had bruised his mistress's ego. He humiliated me publicly, freezing my accounts to buy family heirlooms for her. He stood by while she threatened to leak our private tapes to the press. He destroyed my dignity to play the hero for a woman he thought was a helpless orphan. He had no idea she was a fraud. He didn't know I had installed micro-cameras throughout the estate while he was busy pampering her. He didn't know I had hours of footage showing his "innocent" Aria sleeping with his guards, his rivals, and even his staff, laughing about how easy he was to manipulate. At the annual charity gala, in front of the entire crime family, Alessandro demanded I apologize to her. I didn't beg. I didn't cry. I simply connected my drive to the main projector and pressed play.

I died on a Tuesday. It wasn't a quick death. It was slow, cold, and meticulously planned by the man who called himself my father. I was twenty years old. He needed my kidney to save my sister. The spare part for the golden child. I remember the blinding lights of the operating theater, the sterile smell of betrayal, and the phantom pain of a surgeon's scalpel carving into my flesh while my screams echoed unheard. I remember looking through the observation glass and seeing him-my father, Giovanni Vitiello, the Don of the Chicago Outfit-watching me die with the same detached expression he used when signing a death warrant. He chose her. He always chose her. And then, I woke up. Not in heaven. Not in hell. But in my own bed, a year before my scheduled execution. My body was whole, unscarred. The timeline had reset, a glitch in the cruel matrix of my existence, giving me a second chance I never asked for. This time, when my father handed me a one-way ticket to London-an exile disguised as a severance package-I didn't cry. I didn't beg. My heart, once a bleeding wound, was now a block of ice. He didn't know he was talking to a ghost. He didn't know I had already lived through his ultimate betrayal. He also didn't know that six months ago, during the city's brutal territory wars, I was the one who saved his most valuable asset. In a secret safe house, I stitched up the wounds of a blinded soldier, a man whose life hung by a thread. He never saw my face. He only knew my voice, the scent of vanilla, and the steady touch of my hands. He called me Sette. Seven. For the seven stitches I put in his shoulder. That man was Dante Moretti. The Ruthless Capo. The man my sister, Isabella, is now set to marry. She stole my story. She claimed my actions, my voice, my scent. And Dante, the man who could spot a lie from a mile away, believed the beautiful deception because he wanted it to be true. He wanted the golden girl to be his savior, not the invisible sister who was only ever good for her spare parts. So I took the ticket. In my past life, I fought them, and they silenced me on an operating table. This time, I will let them have their perfect, gilded lie. I will go to London. I will disappear. I will let Seraphina Vitiello die on that plane. But I will not be a victim. This time, I will not be the lamb led to slaughter. This time, from the shadows of my exile, I will be the one holding the match. And I will wait, with the patience of the dead, to watch their entire world burn. Because a ghost has nothing to lose, and a queen of ashes has an empire to gain.

I was the spare daughter of the Vitiello crime family, born solely to provide organs for my golden sister, Isabella. Four years ago, under the codename "Seven," I nursed Dante Moretti, the Don of Chicago, back to health in a safe house. I was the one who held him in the dark. But Isabella stole my name, my credit, and the man I loved. Now, Dante looked at me with nothing but cold disgust, believing her lies. When a neon sign crashed down on the street, Dante used his body to shield Isabella, leaving me to be crushed under twisted steel. While Isabella sat in a VIP suite crying over a scratch, I lay broken, listening to my parents discuss if my kidneys were still viable for harvest. The final straw came at their engagement gala. When Dante saw me wearing the lava stone bracelet I had worn in the safe house, he accused me of stealing it from Isabella. He ordered my father to punish me. I took fifty lashes to my back while Dante covered Isabella's eyes, protecting her from the ugly truth. That night, the love in my heart finally died. On the morning of their wedding, I handed Dante a gift box containing a cassette tape—the only proof that I was Seven. Then, I signed the papers disowning my family, threw my phone out the car window, and boarded a one-way flight to Sydney. By the time Dante listens to that tape and realizes he married a monster, I will be thousands of miles away, never to return.

For three years, I documented the slow death of my marriage in a black journal. It was my 100-point divorce plan: for every time my husband, Blake, chose his first love, Ariana, over me, I deducted points. When the score hit zero, I would leave. The final points vanished the night he left me bleeding out from a car crash. I was eight weeks pregnant with the child we had prayed for. In the ER, the nurses frantically called him-the star surgeon of the very hospital I was dying in. "Dr. Santos, we have a Jane Doe, O-negative, bleeding out. She's pregnant, and we're about to lose them both. We need you to authorize an emergency blood transfer." His voice came over the speaker, cold and impatient. "I can't. My priority is Miss Whitfield. Do what you can for the patient, but I can't divert anything right now." He hung up. He condemned his own child to death to ensure his ex-girlfriend had resources on standby after a minor procedure.

I was dying at the banquet, coughing up black blood while the pack celebrated my step-sister Lydia’s promotion. Across the room, Caleb, the Alpha and my Fated Mate, didn't look concerned. He looked annoyed. "Stop it, Elena," his voice boomed in my head. "Don't ruin this night with your attention-seeking lies." I begged him, telling him it was poison, but he just ordered me to leave his Pack House so I wouldn't dirty the floor. Heartbroken, I publicly demanded the Severing Ceremony to break our bond and left to die alone in a cheap motel. Only after I took my last breath did the truth come out. I sent Caleb the medical records proving Lydia had been poisoning my tea with wolfsbane for ten years. He went mad with grief, realizing he had protected the murderer and rejected his true mate. He tortured Lydia, but his regret couldn't bring me back. Or so he thought. In the afterlife, the Moon Goddess showed me my reflection. I wasn't a wolfless weakling. I was a White Wolf, the rarest and most powerful of all, suppressed by poison. "You can stay here in peace," the Goddess said. "Or you can go back." I looked at the life they stole from me. I looked at the power I never got to use. "I want to go back," I said. "Not for his love. But for revenge." I opened my eyes, and for the first time in my life, my wolf roared.

For ten years, I secretly loved my guardian, Ethan Hayes. After my family fell apart, he took me in and raised me. He was my entire world. On my eighteenth birthday, I gathered all my courage to confess my love to him. But his reaction was a fury I had never seen before. He swept my birthday cake to the floor and roared, "Are you insane? I am your GUARDIAN!" He then mercilessly tore the painting I had spent a year on-my confession-to shreds. Just days later, he brought home his fiancée, Chloe. The man who had promised to wait for me to grow up, who called me his brightest star, had vanished. My decade of desperate, burning love had only managed to burn myself. The person who was supposed to protect me had become the one who hurt me the most. I looked down at the NYU acceptance letter in my hand. I had to leave. I had to pull him out of my heart, no matter how much it hurt. I picked up the phone and dialed my father's number. "Dad," I said, my voice hoarse, "I've decided. I want to come be with you in New York."

I was reviewing the laundering accounts when my husband asked for a hundred thousand dollars for the nanny. It took three seconds for me to realize the woman he was trying to pay off was wearing my missing vintage Chanel earrings. Damian looked me in the eye, using his best doctor's voice. "She is struggling, Ainsley. She has five boys to feed." When Casey walked in, she wasn't wearing a uniform. She was wearing my jewelry and looking at my husband with intimate familiarity. Instead of apologizing when I confronted them, Damian protected her. He looked at me with a mixture of pity and disgust. "She is a good mother," he sneered. "Something you wouldn't understand." He used the infertility I had spent millions trying to cure as a weapon against me. He didn't know that I had just received the investigator's file. The file that proved those five boys were his. The file that proved he had gotten a secret vasectomy six months before we started trying for a baby. He had let me endure years of painful procedures, hormones, and shame, all while funding his secret family with my father's money. I looked at the man I had shielded from the violence of my world so he could play god in a white coat. I didn't scream. I am a Pierce. We execute. I picked up my phone and dialed my enforcer. "I want him ruined. I want him to have nothing. I want him to wish he was dead."

To the outside world, I was the envy of every she-wolf as the fiancée of Alpha Kael. But inside the gilded cage of his pack house, I was a ghost. I molded myself into perfection for him, wearing the colors he liked and suppressing my own voice. Until I walked past his study and saw him with Lyra—the orphan he called his "sister." His hand rested intimately on her thigh as he laughed, telling her, "Elara is just a political necessity. You are the moon in my sky." My heart shattered, but the physical blow came days later. During a training exercise, the safety cable snapped. I fell twenty feet, shattering my leg. Lying in the dirt, gasping through the pain, I watched my Fated Mate run. Not to me. He ran to Lyra, who was burying her face in his chest, feigning terror. He comforted her while I bled. Later, in the infirmary, I heard him whisper to her, "She won't die. It will just teach her who the real Luna is." He knew. He knew she had sabotaged the rope with silver, and he was protecting her attempted murder. The final thread of my love incinerated into ash. The next morning, I walked into the Council Hall, threw a thick file on the table, and looked the Elders in the eye. "I am dissolving the engagement," I stated coldly. "And I am withdrawing my family's silver supply. I will starve this Pack until you beg." Kael laughed, thinking I was bluffing. He didn't notice the lethal Beta from the rival pack standing in the shadows behind me, ready to help me burn Kael's kingdom to the ground.

I carried a thermal container of stew to my fiancé's private estate, worried he was stressed about our upcoming pack merger. Instead of a meditation retreat, I walked into a nightmare. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, I saw Ivan playing on the rug with a secret son, while a woman named Kiera watched like a queen. I froze as I heard Ivan's voice float through the glass. "Aliana is just a placeholder. She smells like antiseptic and fear. Once I get the territory, I'll reject her." My heart shattered, but the knife twisted deeper when he laughed about my parents. "Her folks pay for this villa, Kiera. They know. They prefer a strong alliance over a disappointment of a daughter." My own parents were drugging me to steal my medical patents. They thought I was weak. They thought I was just a submissive Healer. I wiped my tears and unlocked his safe with the admin codes he forgot I installed. I took the financial records, the fake DNA tests, and the theft agreements. That night, at his secret son's birthday party, I didn't bring a gift. I brought a projector. I played their confession for the entire Council, severed the mate bond publicly, and vanished into the North. Six months later, a ruined, homeless Ivan crawled into my clinic, begging for the legendary White Wolf to save him. He looked up, shocked to see me standing there, glowing with silver power. "You rejected the gift of the Goddess," I smiled, letting my Alpha aura crush him to the floor. "Now, get out."

On my birthday, my mother told me it was time to choose a fiancé from New York's most eligible bachelors. She urged me to pick Alexander Booth, the man I loved with a foolish passion in my previous life. But I remembered how that love story ended. On the eve of our wedding, Alexander faked his death in a private jet crash. I spent years as his grieving fiancée, only to find him alive and well on a beach, laughing with the poor student I had personally sponsored. They even had a child. When I confronted him, our friends-the men who had pretended to comfort me-held me down. They helped Alexander throw me into the ocean and watched from the pier as I drowned. As the water closed over my head, only one person showed any real emotion. My childhood rival, Darrian Golden, screamed my name as they held him back, his face twisted in grief. He was the only one who cried at my funeral. Opening my eyes again, I was back in our penthouse, just a week before the big decision. This time, when my mother asked me to choose Alexander, I gave her a different name. I chose the man who mourned me. I chose Darrian Golden.

On the eve of my wedding, a viral TikTok revealed my fiancé had married another woman a week ago. When I confronted him, Jacob called it a "pity marriage." He dismissed our seven years together, offered me cash to shut up, and when I refused, he slapped me across the face. "You're the other woman now," he snarled, threatening to ruin me if I spoke out. The worst part? I was pregnant with his child. To break free from this monster, I made a heartbreaking choice and secretly terminated the pregnancy. When you have nothing left to lose, you become unstoppable. Tonight, at the live-streamed Tech Innovators Gala where he plans to accept our award with his new wife, I'm taking the stage. I'm not just taking back my company-I'm burning his entire world to the ground.

I was the Architect who built the digital fortress for the most feared Don in New York. To the world, I was Brendan Wiggins’s silent, elegant Queen. But then my burner phone buzzed under the dinner table. It was a photo from his mistress: a positive pregnancy test. "Your husband is celebrating right now," the caption read. "You are just the furniture." I looked across the table at Brendan. He smiled and held my hand, lying to my face without blinking. He thought he owned me because he saved my life ten years ago. He told her I was just "functional." That I was a barren asset he kept around to look respectable, while she carried his legacy. He thought I would accept the disrespect because I had nowhere else to go. He was wrong. I didn't want to divorce him—you don't divorce a Don. And I didn't want to kill him. That was too easy. I wanted to erase him. I liquidated fifty million dollars from the offshore accounts only I could access. I destroyed the servers I had built. Then, I contacted a black-market chemist for a procedure called "Tabula Rasa." It doesn't kill the body. It wipes the mind clean. A total hard reset of the soul. On his birthday, while he was out celebrating his bastard son, I drank the vial. When he finally came home to find the empty house and the melted wedding ring, he realized the truth. He could burn the world down looking for me, but he would never find his wife. Because the woman who loved him no longer existed.

To have a child with her husband, who had fertility issues, she agreed to undergo in vitro fertilization. However, she inadvertently discovered that she had been used as a means to have a child by her husband and his mistress. The embryos used in the procedure had been swapped by her husband, replacing them with his sperm and the mistress's egg. Devastated by the betrayal, she decided to go to the hospital to terminate the pregnancy. Yet, the doctor revealed an unexpected twist: due to a nurse's mistake, the child she was carrying was actually hers and that of a stranger. And this stranger turned out to be the mafia leader! Thus began a series of unforeseen complications.

For seven years, I hid my identity as a wealthy heiress to be with my boyfriend, Ewing. I followed him across the country and made myself small so he could feel big. On Thanksgiving, he ditched our celebration for his first love, Bree, who supposedly had a "burst pipe." Later, she posted an intimate selfie with him, calling him her "hero." Then she sent me a video of him at a bar, laughing with his friends. "She's just being dramatic," he slurred, smirking at the camera. "A new necklace and she'll forget all about it. She's easy." Easy. Seven years of my life, my love, my sacrifice-all reduced to that one word. I realized I was never his partner. I was just a placeholder. I didn't cry. I packed my bags, booked a one-way flight to New York, and sent him one final text before blocking his number. "Don't bother coming home. I'm getting married."

Elora Griffiths was on her way to drop her daughter off at school when her husband's enemies opened fire in the street. The bodyguard her husband had personally assigned to protect them abandoned the car the instant the shots rang out. Mother and daughter were hit multiple times, teetering on the brink of death. Elora frantically called her husband, Rodger Griffiths, but he didn't answer. Her brother, Hugh Dale, arrived just in time and saved them both. "How could this happen? Didn't Rodger assign someone to protect you?" Hugh asked. Elora sobbed uncontrollably, "The bodyguard ran away!" On the way to the hospital, Elora kept trying Rodger's number, desperate. One call after another... Finally, on the ninety-ninth attempt, the line connected. On the other end was the female bodyguard, trembling, her voice barely holding back tears. "Rodger, it's really not my fault! There were so many assassins. I would've died if I tried to stop them! I was so scared..." Elora held her breath, waiting for her husband's wrath to thunder down. But Rodger just sighed. "Forget it. The important thing is you're safe," he said. Meanwhile, Elora's daughter took her last breath in her arms. The pain was suffocating. She held her daughter close as her body went cold and stiff, teeth gritted in fury, "Hugh, I'm divorcing him! I'll cut off every single arms shipment to the Griffiths family from the largest arms company in Crownport!"

My fiancé, Ethan, insisted we use our life savings-the money for our dream architectural firm-to buy a house for his widowed friend, Kiera. He called it a sacred promise. I called it betrayal. After weeks of fighting, I discovered the truth. He hadn't been asking for my permission; he had already emptied our joint account two months ago. A photo confirmed it: him and Kiera, toasting with champagne, celebrating the day he stole our future. He then had the nerve to ask me to design her new house for free. When I finally confronted him, he chose to believe her fake pregnancy and her staged fall, calling me a "monster" as he rushed her to the hospital. He didn't just take our money; he stole my voice and painted me as the villain in his story. So while he played the hero for her, I quietly canceled our wedding, sold our assets, and booked a one-way ticket to a new life. He thought he was breaking me, but he was setting me free.

My family and fiancé begged me to donate my last remaining kidney to my twin sister, Kyleigh. They didn't know I was already dying. My fiancé, Axel, gave me an ultimatum. "Donate the kidney, or I'll break our engagement and marry Kyleigh. It's her dying wish." I agreed, only for them to frame me for plagiarism with my own thesis, forcing me to confess on camera. They never knew I was the one who secretly saved our father with my other kidney five years ago-a sacrifice Kyleigh had stolen all the credit for. As they wheeled me into the operating room, they celebrated with Kyleigh, promising her a future built on my death. I was already a ghost to them. But I died on the table. The surgeon, seeing the old surgical scar and the poison riddling my body, walked out to face them. "This wasn't a donation," she announced, her voice cold as steel. "This was murder."

When I was eight, Dante Moretti pulled me from the fire that killed my family. For ten years, the powerful crime boss was my protector and my god. Then, he announced his engagement to another woman to unite two criminal empires. He brought her home and named her the future mistress of the Moretti family. In front of everyone, his fiancée forced a cheap metal collar around my neck, calling me their pet. Dante knew I was allergic. He just watched, his eyes cold, and ordered me to take it. That night, I listened through the walls as he took her to his bed. I finally understood the promise he’d made me as a child was a lie. I wasn't his family. I was his property. After a decade of devotion, my love for him finally turned to ash. So on his birthday, the day he celebrated his new future, I walked out of his gilded cage for good. A private jet was waiting to take me to my real father—his greatest enemy.

Everyone told me I was "too much," but billionaire Conor Hudson seemed to love my chaotic energy. I thought his quiet demeanor was a safe harbor. I was wrong. His silence wasn't love; it was a cage he built to hide his obsession with his adopted sister, Hillery. When Hillery committed a hit-and-run, Conor didn't call the police. He grabbed me, his eyes cold and terrifying, and demanded I take the fall for her. "You're my wife," he snarled. "You owe me this." When I refused to be their scapegoat, he imprisoned me in a windowless room, weaponizing my severe claustrophobia to break my mind. That' s when I uncovered the sickest truth of all. Hillery wasn't just his lover. She was a fraud who had stolen my dead sister's art legacy-and was the very reason my sister was murdered. Conor thought he could torture me into silence. Instead, I escaped. On the night of Hillery's lavish engagement party, I hijacked the global live stream. I looked into the camera, smiling at the husband watching in horror. "I' m giving you exactly what you wanted, Conor. You' re free."